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Tuesday, March 11, 2014

The Vital Step That Your Training Program Is Missing

Working for a training and consulting organization, we do a
lot of training (and we do it quite well, if I do say so myself). Organizations
of all types, sizes, industries, etc. call us and have one of our providers
come out and train their folks on a variety of topics. Some clients have very
specific needs and do a great job of ensuring that our training is customized
to meet those needs. Other clients just want us to come out there and do the
training (usually to meet some sort of regulatory requirement).

Sure, it’s fun getting to interact with folks and have
discussions about safety, but one thing that we rarely get called out to do is
to do something that is the first and most important step in training
development.

Stop right there for a second and think about – what is the
“first and most important step in training development”?

I’m sure any number of really good ideas came to mind, such
as “know your audience” or “customize the material” or something along those
lines. These are important, but they aren’t the most important. The first step
and the most important step in a training development process can best be
described using the verbiage of the ANSI/ASSE Z490.1-2009 standard Criteria for Accepted Practices in Safety,
Health, and Environmental Training:

“A determination shall be made as
to whether training is the correct response to a given organizational need.”

Put another way, the first step in training develop is to
ask the question – do we even really need another training course? This is
called a “training needs assessment” and it’s often the part of a training
development process that is taken for granted. After all, isn’t the point of
training development to develop training? If the training development process
eliminates training that doesn’t make sense.

The problem with this line of thinking is that it takes for
granted that training is always a good solution to the problem. To test whether
that theory is true think about your own experience – how many times have you
sat through a training course, even a very good one, and then a short time
after the training you can’t remember what you were taught? So how effective
was that training?

A training needs assessment forces us to take a hard look at
what problems we’re trying to solve and to really think about the best way to
solve that problem. To put this into terms similar to the Z490.1 standard
above, we need to figure out what the “given organizational need” is that is
driving the training.

This sounds like one of those dumb questions that make people
roll their eyes, but think about it for a second – why do we train our
employees? Often it’s because there’s some knowledge or behavior we want them
to have or perform so that they can be safe (at least that’s the stated goal).
A big mistake many make which leads them to skip doing a good training needs
assessment is that they think that the “organizational need” in that statement
above is that the employees need to have knowledge or behavior, which implies
that there’s a problem that training is best to fix. There’re two flaws with
this line of thinking:

1. Even if there is a knowledge or behavioral problem,
training may not be the best solution. What if the behavior problem is that
employees are skipping a step in a procedure because the procedure is poorly
written? Training is unlikely to fix this problem. In fact, if your training
doesn’t match reality then employees are less likely to take your training
seriously.

2. The organizational need is not the knowledge or behavior
issue, it’s the need for employees to be safe. What if instead of doing
training we looked at the workplace and redesigned it to eliminate the hazard –
would that be better than training? This can apply even in cases where training
is required by law. OSHA only requires training when certain conditions apply.
For example, you only need confined space training when going into a
permit-required confined space. What if you can find a way to not go into the
space and still get the job done, or you could reconfigure the space to make it
no longer a permit-required confined space, through re-design?

Furthermore, the training needs assessment forces you to
think about the problems you really want to solve, which can help you solve the
problem of ineffective training. So instead of just throwing employees in a
training class, you might identify that they need training and then follow-up
by their supervisor in a few months, or they need training and a new,
user-friendly checklist to remember the safety critical steps. The needs
assessment forces you to think through the problem and come up with a system
that can deal with the problem. This makes the training work for your system,
rather than your management system accommodating the training.